Last week I told you my story about how I found someone on the Internet (see Use the Web to Find Anyone in the World). This week I’ll show you the tools I used, the ones I recommend, and a few of the arrows aimed my way by subscribers. (As it turns out, many of you turned up search engines I hadn’t heard about, so make sure you read “What You Had to Say” below.)

If you attempt a search, don’t feel discouraged when many of the search engines dump you on a fee-based service. You’ll also find yourself heading deep into wild goose territory, with false leads and not-valuable-information. Stay focused on the clues, confirmations, and matches.

Another clue I haven’t talked about — and it’s a biggie — is using an e-mail address to find someone. That’s how I recently found the phone number of a YahooGroup moderator who’d abandoned his post. His e-mail address was on the Net about four times, but one forum showed his name, and the city and state he might have lived in. That was all I needed.

Small World Department

Three TechBite subscribers wrote and said they knew of Jan Shepherd. One went to high school with him in New York; two live in Corpus Christi and knew of his death.

The “Find Anyone” Search Tools to Use

I’ve listed the sites I use and annotated a few of them. They’re in no specific order and, as you’ve guessed, there are millions of places to try. For instance, you can visit every state by Googling “State of [state name].” Once there, you’ll find listings for assorted agencies. For instance, you can track down licensed individuals — contractors, physicians, and the like — as well as birth and death records, tax assessor rolls, and other public records.

E-mail addresses can be valuable when doing a search. The problem is that some search sites aren’t terrifically useful. For example, the Usenet Addresses Database is good only if your target makes use of Usenet. Others to try are My E-mail Address Is (be sure to uncheck the premium services) and Find mE-Mail.

EmailAddress claims to be a free service — and it is. Kind of. They have some links to good, if sometimes obscure listings, such as the Jewish E-mail Directory, NewFoundMail, and the Swiss E-mail Directory. (Check these resources here and here.) Unfortunately, many of the links lead to fee-based sites.

Freeality is a comprehensive compendium of fill-in-the-blanks searches for reverse business phone number lookups, e-mail addresses, area codes, and other data. It’s hit or miss, though, because many of the results bring you to Intelius, that same pesky fee-based service.

Looking up phone numbers can give you ways to confirm a name and number you may have found on another search engine. Of course, Google does a good job. Entering the phone number with this format works best: 818-555-1212. FoneFinder gives you the city, state, and telephone carrier, but FreeCellPhoneTracer and Cellphone Registry are of minimal help, unless you want to pay a fee.

Docusearch Investigations claims to have 300 free links for online databases. Not all of the links work, but if you need something specific, say, finding out if your brother-in-law is still in the state lockup in Florida, you just may luck out.

SearchSystems has lots to offer if you know how to work it. First, ignore the field at the top asking for first and last name. That leads you to — who else? — Intelius. Each of the links listed on the page, say, Maine Public Records, gets you to another page with a healthy number of links to data in Maine. Click the link, you’re swept away to a SearchSystems ad, and you have to wait 20 seconds. Instead, copy and paste the name of the link, such as “Maine Public Records” into Google.

What You Had to Say

Dan Tynan, Infoworld columnist and bon vivant wrote, “That was way too easy. You started with too many good clues. Geez, man, you practically had his birth certificate and driver’s license in front of you. Also, you might have saved time by including Linkedin or Facebook, or even Twitter in your Google search terms, or using one of the search aggregators (like Spock, which I hate, or Pipl).”

Despite Dan’s inability to be civil, or even a little grateful for the time I posted bail for him, his two recommendations are worth a try.

Pipl is very good. It’s a metasearch site, which means it looks at lots of sites and gives me the results on one page. The output included business listings, Web pages, blogs, documents, and news articles, all with enough of an example for me to quickly know if the result was worth following. I’m less enamored with Spock — when I tried it, the search results weren’t very useful.

I also got advice from a Gary, a person-finding professional on the TechBite list:
“LOL — stick to being a techie, Steve. I am a professional genealogist and finding people is part of what I do. You went through a lot of effort to find out about Jan Shephard.” Gary gave me his professional techniques for finding people:

To find a living person in the U.S., or sometimes someone who has died in the past decade, I use Peoplefinders. Its sources are bank records, insurance records, and more. My belief is everyone over 20 years old is in Peoplefinders since everyone over that age has created some public record.

Peoplefinders’ $2 fee for info is nominal. If you don’t want to spend the money (going through the payment process is more a pain than spending the money), go to PeopleData; most of the time it provides free addresses and telephone numbers.

Use WhitePages to do reverse lookups on telephone numbers. If you don’t get the results you want, try Google and other national telephone directories, such as SwitchBoard and AnyWho.

If a mailing address is no longer valid, I use WhitePages to try to get the name of the current resident. If that’s not possible I add or subtract 2 to the street number to get the phone number of a neighbor, who usually can tell you what happened to the person.

For a person who died after 1962, use the Social Security Death Index at RootsWeb. It invariably provides the birth date, month and year of death, and zip code of last residence where the Social Security number was issued.

Now that you have the tools, go find your Uncle Morris and ask him if you’re still in his will.

[This post is excerpted from Steve’s TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up–it’s delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it’s free.]

5 Comments For This Post

Excellent article! I have been a huge fan of conducting background checks especially since I have become an active real estate investor with many rental properties. I have gone through many services over the years and rather than spending a ton of time on each search, I have found that the best solution for me has to invest the $30 at http://tenantscreeningbackgroundcheck.com and obtain a comprehensive background check that generally gets sent to me within 24 hours from the time I place an order. I like the fact that all reports are generated by a private investigator.

As a small business owner I rely heavily on background checks. I do not hire employees and agree to work with others without first running a background check. I have found Intelius to provide the most comprehensive background check for my money. Thank you for the insight into additional companies, etc. If you’re interested in learning more about Intelius you can find them online at https://www.intelius.com/